Going Hollywood Wasn't Easy for Grand Theft Auto

The Grand Theft Auto series redefined gaming, pioneering the go-anywhere, do-anything "sandbox" genre and touching off worldwide debates about sex and violence in videogames. Wired contributor David Kushner tells the riveting history of the series in a new book, available this week from Wiley, titled Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto.

Rockstar co-founder Jamie King wanted to recruit big-name stars to play the characters in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, but found that working with Hollywood talent was full of challenges. In this excerpt, Rockstar creators King, Navid Khonsari and Dan Houser recount the tales of working with actors Ray Liotta, Jenna Jameson and Burt Reynolds.

Vice City
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Next thing he knew, they were sitting at Peter Luger’s Steakhouse in Brooklyn with Liotta himself, drinking and laughing and effusing about how much they loved his films. Then suddenly Liotta went cold for no reason, staring them down.

“Why the fuck are you laughing?” he snapped.

The guys gulped. Liotta cracked up. “I’m fucking with you!” he said.

“He totally Goodfellaed us!” King said. Liotta signed on, but the Goodfellas shtick wasn’t entirely an act, as Khonsari later recalled after taping the voice-over session. Liotta limped in, bitterly sore from a basketball game. “The last fucking video game I played was Pong,” he said wearily.

What the hell? Khonsari thought. Khonsari’s dad was a doctor, and here was this Hollywood tough guy—who was getting paid half what his dad made in a year? And he was copping an attitude? “Look,” Khonsari said, “I don’t really give a shit what you do outside this, I mean, I loved you in Goodfellas, but this is a job, and you gotta do this.” Khonsari got him a big cup of Starbucks, and he calmed down and got into the part.

For Vice City’s porn star Candy Suxxx, Khonsari suggested adult star Jenna Jameson and offered her $5,000 for the part. It’d be an easy gig for her, something she could do when she was in town for the Howard Stern radio show. Turned out, her boyfriend was a huge GTA III fan – done deal. For Vice City, Khonsari motion-captured a scene of Candy on her back, having implied sex with a fisherman who joked about his twelve-inch fish. “Yeah,” he said, “it’s regulation, baby!”

Still, the guys tittered nervously like school kids when Jameson came to the studio to read her part. Dan took one look at her in her tight blue jeans and black shirt, and began to “feel very English,” as he said, and embarrassed. It didn’t help that she showed up at the session with her father. “Look, I have no problem with her father,” Khonsari whispered to Dan, “but I do not feel comfortable making her moan and groan as if she’s getting banged.”

With Jameson’s father glowering, the time for the orgasm came in more ways than one. “Oh, hello, Jenna,” Dan said, awkwardly. “So could you sound like you’re excited?”

She eyed him dubiously. “What do you mean?”

“Sound like you’re happy! Like you’re having a great time!” He snapped his fingers. “Sound like you’re eating a chocolate bar!”

“So it’s supposed to be kind of like sex?” she deadpanned, “or like I’m eating a chocolate bar?”

“Yes, like you’re having sex,” Dan said, “that would be perfect!”

She obliged.

Nothing prepared them for their visit with Burt Reynolds, who played Avery Carrington, a real estate mogul in the game. Since the guys had grown up on the actor’s campy and macho classics – Smokey and the Bandit, Deliverance – they were psyched to work with him. Reynolds showed up ready to work and be treated like a star. Khonsari could see the disdain in his eyes, the attitude so many other actors copped about the medium. “They look at you like ‘Who the fuck are you?’” he recalled, “‘You’re game guys.’” Khonsari had no qualms about putting actors in their place. “If you want me to break it down to you,” he’d say, “these games gross over half a billion dollars, more than all of your movies put together!”

Yet with Reynolds, he lost his nerve. Khonsari recalled how, after Reynolds cut his scene, Dan asked politely for another take. “Hey,” Dan said, “can you say that line again?”

Reynolds stared him down and muttered, “Say that again?”

“Can you do the line again?” Dan repeated.

“You know, you need to give people an ‘atta boy.’”

“An ‘atta boy’?”

“Yeah, people do something good, you gotta give them an ‘atta boy.’”

Khonsari and Dan shifted uncomfortably, having no clue what Reynolds was talking about at first—then realized he wanted a bit of acclaim before he did anything again. He wanted a “that a boy.” They redid the line, but Khonsari thought that Reynolds’s attitude only got worse. The studio grew hot, so hot he was sweating through his clothes. Unbeknownst to Reynolds, his manager had gone out to buy him a dry shirt. When the shirt arrived, Dan innocently approached Reynolds. “Oh, your shirt’s here,” he said.

Reynolds didn’t know the shirt was coming and must have thought Dan was insulting him for being sopping wet. “There’s going to be two hits here,” Reynolds told him, “me hitting you and you hitting the floor!”

Dan flipped, ready to cut Reynolds out of the game entirely. Khonsari intervened. “We got the performance,” he told Dan. “He’s a total cock, but let’s move on.”